


Sweet Like Cinnamon

by squarizona



Series: Sweet Like Cinnamon [1]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-22
Updated: 2013-02-22
Packaged: 2017-12-03 06:17:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/695147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squarizona/pseuds/squarizona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Walt Hasser's life is a paper jam, copyediting for years at RollingStone, taking his days with a grain of salt, smudged at the edges with toner and ink from busted red ballpoint pens. And now he's been faced with the task of dislodging himself from the rut, given his first job as an on-the-road journalist for some band he doesn't even listen to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sweet Like Cinnamon

**Author's Note:**

> so this is a thing! I'm writing this for my friend taylor, who turned 21 yesterday. I've been telling her I was gonna write this since her birthday LAST year, but I work at a glacial pace, as anyone who reads my work on here knows (because nothing's ever finished or updated!) but I've set myself a small limit. this is going to be about three parts, and I'm here and now absolving myself of guilt if I don't update for a while. but this is part one, and it's hefty enough to tide y'all over for a while.
> 
> taylor, I love you forever and ever, happy birthday, I hope you like it! xx

I guess I just never really grew out of the stubborn shyness of my adolescence. I had never been one to go looking for trouble, even when I was younger. My older brother would hook me under a playful arm and grind his knuckles into the soft part of the top of my head and tell me that I’d grow into it, but I sat with quiet passivity and watched opportunities for rambunctious carelessness pass in waves like a parade through middle school, high school, the sunrise advent of college. I saw my brother deposited in our front den—sometimes by his friends, sometimes by police—knocked off his feet by the vapors of alcohol and a damn good life. He was my ever-present example, the family’s guinea pig, a reminder like a school bell that I was wasting my chances to live up in exchange for good grades and excellence in academia, for a pat on the head from our parents, for absolutely no good reason other than that I couldn’t make myself test the waters, and I wasn’t entirely sure why.

So when my boss Mr. Ferrando swaggered into my office, leaned against my desk, and personally told me he was going to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse in his grating, raspy voice packaged in a smug splay of a smile, I began trying to swallow a pride I never found in the first place. Like a spoonful of cinnamon, it wouldn’t go, and I felt myself choking. “I don’t know,” I said over and over, spluttering on the familiar cast-offs. “I don’t know. “

He waved one hand, mouth drawn up in a pleased smirk. “You’re gonna love it, kiddo; it’s just what you need.” I felt my stomach twist up and, in turn, my eyes stuck unwaveringly to my keyboard. I didn’t _need_ anything. I chose not to reply, feigning consideration. Really, I was just waiting for him to pick up the signals and leave, but either he was too immovable or didn’t notice—neither would particularly surprise me. He gave my shoulder a tap instead, grin evident in his voice. “You know that band The Six?”

I nudged a pen on my desk with moderate disinterest. “Doesn’t everybody?”

“They’re playing a show at Terminal 5 on Monday night and you’re going to go. After that, you’re going to get on their bus, spend some time on the road with them, and we’ll put you on a plane back home in a few weeks, and you can come right back. I’ve already cleared it and everything.”

“Oh, no. No no no.”

He gave me a sideways look with an unfaltering smile.

“Wouldn’t I be more useful here?”

Ferrando shook his head once, deliberately, then sat back with the smile widening.

“Look, I’ll—I don’t know—tell me to double-time it, make coffee runs every morning, force me to unchain all the paperclips from Evan’s desk drawer… just don’t… don’t do this to me.”

Mr. Ferrando held up his hands, clearing the air. “Walter, Walter. You must trust that Godfather knows best.”

I didn’t trust; I didn’t trust a goddamn thing from anyone, and especially not this, whatever it was. I did everything I could to avoid looking up at him from under my eyelashes.

“Whose job was this in the first place?”

Ferrando winked at the ceiling in concentration, then replied with a small snap of his fingers. “Evan Wright, but he had a family crisis in Florida.” He popped his knuckles and scanned the office. I did, too; on Evan’s immaculately clean desk, the picture frame stood empty. He took the picture of his girlfriend with him, especially when he was called away for work. It wavered between endearing and embarrassing. “And because we’re such a caring, familial… family… we let him go.”

I felt my stomach drop to my toes and my already tensed body ratcheted it up a notch. “Jesus, you fired him because something came up with family?”

Ferrando stared at me for a second, almost as if he had lost himself along the path of our conversation. “What?”

“Let him go?”

“Oh, no, no. I meant that we _allowed_ him to take off of work to go be with his family.” He pointed at me with a nearly parental admonishment. “I meant that bit about being caring.” For a content director of Rolling Stone Magazine, he had an incredibly irritating knack for misusing words and colloquialisms. Really, for speaking in general.

We were inching away from the subject, but once he realized it, he pinned me with his eyes again and that damnable smirk. I kept looking for exits. “What about Craig?”

“Incompetent.”

“Dave?”

“What, is that supposed to be a joke?”

I cut him a look, feeling sickeningly as if I was discussing things beyond my boundaries. “Sir, I would really prefer not to go.”

“Kid, you’re good at writing. You need this break—you’ve been picking through advertisements since we gave you a desk. If you’re going to work under my watch with this kind of skill, then you’re gonna be writing articles if it’s the death of me. I’m not telling you that you have to go, but—“ He dropped a hand on both of my shoulders, and I eyed his left hand on my right shoulder with a muted indignant suspicion. “You have to go.”

Oh, no. No, no, no.

“Uh.”

“Look,” Ferrando said, drawing his hands back to his lap with a lazy flip. “Take the rest of the day off to think about it, come back after the weekend, and be ready to go Monday night.”

I yanked at my collar, drowning in the desert cinnamon sand of my inability. After a beat, I conjured up something of a response. “Are you bribing me with time off work?”

He gestured to the room on either sides of him with palms open to the ceiling. “No, that’s what work _is._ Learn to love it or you’re going to drown.” In that second, I believed him through experience. Shoving off of his leaning spot on my desk, he ambled down the aisle of cubicles with his usual self-importance glowing around him. He leveled a finger at Jason Lilley, the desk jockey of the envied corner cubicle who did film reviews. “Lilley, what are you doing after work on Monday?”

Jason lifted one side of his headphones to listen, processed the request, then slipped the set down to his neck. “Getting blackout drunk and acting immature in front of a group of strangers, if I can. Why, you askin’ me on a date?”

“Wrong. You’re driving Walt to Terminal 5.”

Jason dragged his eyes over to me, too tired on a Friday afternoon to be malicious. I raised my hands, a weak attempt at waving the white flag. He flattened his lips together. “Shiiiit,” he said, replacing his headphones and cranking the volume of his computer. “Whatever you say, brah.”

Ferrando, in a way that tolerated bosses try to scurry up the ladder of respect and attempt to dash away the standards of formality ultimately leading to general discomfort, snapped his fingers at him as he passed. “Deal with it.”

Jason kicked his legs up onto his desk. I tapped my fingers on my own desk, trying to decide what to do with time. Once Ferrando had disappeared into the messy little enclave he called an office, I turned in my chair. “Is that gonna cut into your special gay porn viewing time, Lilley?”

“That was one time, you fuck.”

I started to shut down my laptop, tidying up my space in general before I left for the weekend. “One time apart from all the other times,” I clipped back.

“Fuck _off_ , oh my god.”

I checked my watch. About twenty minutes ‘til five o’clock. Not much to call the rest of the day, but I felt nervous and agitated and I didn’t feel at ease. The thought of driving home and staying there was making me a little dizzy, but I couldn’t stay at my desk. I wished Jason a private, secretive, satisfied weekend and left the office with my bag under my arm. The elevator ride down to the street was swift and relatively painless, except for _Careless Whisper_ tinkering through the speakers. _I’m never gonna dance again, the way I danced with youuuu…_

New York really used to be magical. In a way, it always will be—I grew up in a rural little smudge of a town in Virginia. No city lights there, really; stars stabbed pinprick holes in the night sky everywhere you looked whether you wanted them to or not, and the sky bled beauty from sun-up to blackness and on into the next morning. I couldn’t have imagined New York in any way if I’d tried. I ended up here in a whirlwind of fantastic, blinding wanderlust, an intense need for the polar opposite of the Wonderbread and coal dust and heavy wooden fences and those looming, dark mountains I was raised on. My tedious attention to my schoolwork paid off in the form of a hefty scholarship to NYU, and I went without looking back. I was too busy dodging cars, letting my eyes scale the buildings with reverence. The streets glittered. I was in love with the sidewalks. I even loved pigeons, and everyone in New York hates pigeons. I had no problem going to class every day because I just had to remind myself of where I was and how hard I worked to get there. New York made everything worth it. Something about the sidewalks, I guess.

Five years later and the spark still hadn’t died out completely. I no longer stood for minutes on end to gawk up at the beautiful architecture of the city, and I definitely didn’t love pigeons anymore. I finally understood how folks could grow weary of loving things that take every opportunity to shit on everything that belonged to you, and the logical half of me knew that love shouldn’t be like that. The sidewalks and streets were just another part of the machine—the fineness of it, the symphony of the gears rolling together; it was still heaven to me, just a more tolerated version. It was less raw, less wild. Sometimes I imagined that I missed what used to be home, but in all honesty, I didn’t. I felt like the only person in the world who had successfully redefined home. I still do.

Ahead of me, cabs rolled by and ignored hesitant folks with weak salutes who didn’t understand what wonders assertion could do for a person in a city like this dawdled on the curbs. A woman stood dangerously on the tiptoes of her high heels, a small boy crying into the sheer black fabric of her shoulder. He looked too heavy for her hip, but helpless if he were to be put down. She looked tired, not quite angry. Her red hair was coming unpinned from the back of her head in wisps and strands. While the kid on her arm wailed, she looked like she was ready to do the same. Cabs were ignoring her, but I couldn’t. I stepped to the curb and unthinkingly touched her elbow with my fingertips. While she looked down, I whistled and tossed my hand into the air of the street to hail a cab. At the sound, her son sucked in his lip and stopped crying. A single yellow taxi jolted to a sudden, obedient halt. I held open the door for her, and with confused gratefulness replacing the frustration that had enveloped her before, she thanked me twice and told me I was kind. Her kid’s tear-flooded eyes followed me as she tucked him into the seat behind the driver. She followed suit. I told her it was all in the timing, and she thanked me again. I shut the door behind her and didn’t wait for the cab to roll away before cutting around the building and into the parking deck.

My shitty little sedan’s parking space lay on the first level near the door. With my keys in my hand and my hand on the door, I looked down at myself—white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled above my elbows, loose tie, dark jeans. I looked like a prep school reject asshole that refused to accept that he was chained to his office desk, and I felt like it. I had no disillusions about my work—I proofread, I nitpicked, I mediated between the writer, the printer, and the rubber stamp. I worked alone with a set of headphones keeping the world at a cord’s length. I was good at my job, and I believed that I was happy doing it. I wasn’t fit for much else. I believed that, too.

 I pulled my phone out and did what I always do whenever I start believing things. A familiar sweep across the keypad and I suffered the ringing while I waited for a familiar voice.

“ _Heyyy, Walt!”_

I pulled the phone away from my ear a fraction of an inch to allow space for my brother’s voice, which was and had always been like a pack of stampeding wild horses. It was amplified by joy, and it drew a smile from me. “Hey, Garrett. How’s it going?”

“ _Aw, don’t give me none of that formal bullshit. You know how many months it’s been?”_

I did. Too many, and we both knew it. “Phone works two ways, you know.”

“ _Yeahhhh, yeah._ ” I let the conversation fall slack. I leaned my weight against my hand on the door. In that way that I’ll never know how, he picked up right where I had dropped it. His voice took on an edge of his four-year seniority, wrapped up in the protectiveness I had known growing up. “ _What’s wrong, bud?”_ The following deliverance felt like a hug. I unlocked my car door and sat down before my knees buckled.

“I just… need to talk to you.”

“ _What is it?”_

I turned the keys in the ignition; the clock blinked to life. After a quick calculation, I made a decision. The gas tank was nearly full. “I’d rather talk in person. Are you at home?”

“ _Yeah, but… Jesus, it’ll be a while before you get here.”_

“Alright, stay home. I’ll come by way of the turnpike and be there before seven.”

My brother had moved to Philadelphia after school and took up a job in a steel factory; the environment was good for a guy like him, a thin containment of energy and strength, having been carved out of the brawn of Appalachia. I, scrawny and weak and dodgy, would never thrive in any place the way he thrived in South Philly.

“ _Okay, but…”_ I could hear him shifting the dishes in the sink, running the tap. “ _Will you be okay until then?_ ”

I told him I’d be fine, and I would. I said that it wasn’t anything that couldn’t wait. He told me that he’d have a bottle of something waiting for me and to call if anything came up. I told him that I missed him and was looking forward to seeing me. He told me to drive safely, and we both hung up.

I threw my car in reverse, checking the mirror to make sure I didn’t accidentally back into any of my coworkers. I cleared the deck and didn’t think again until I was on the highway with the city behind me.

I was on his front step at six fifty-eight. He lived on a dark, dingy strip of apartments and disheveled townhomes in a forgotten little pocket of the city. Three kids where poking a lost, lethargic frog with an untwisted wire coat hanger in the middle of the street. I watched them for a while, waiting for the door to open. When it did, I hardly had time to notice; Garrett wrapped me in a tight hug on the front step like I’d just come home from war, squeezing my arms down close to my sides so I couldn’t hug him back and my lungs so I couldn’t supplement it with words, only pathetic little gasps. He swayed in place without letting go or loosening up, just so I knew how much he had missed me. The kids had stopped prodding the poor frog, allowing him to struggle away while they took a turn watching me. I could barely move my hand, but I twitched the fingers of my right hand in a small wave at them. They didn’t react.

Garrett finally let go and held me by my biceps at an arm’s length with gentle hands. “Look at you, man!” He checked every inch of my face with his eyes. I hadn’t gotten a good look at his face before, but I noticed the beginnings of facial hair. I mustered up a little smile for him. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer. What are you standing out here for? Come in, come in!” He ushered me through the threshold and pulled the door shut behind me.

His apartment was small and on the ground level of the building. It was the kind of place that looked like it would be hard to keep clean, and the lights were the kind that never got quite bright enough, so the entire apartment was always cast over with a hazy, half-assed golden yellow. The couch, dark gray and saggy and draped with a worn throw blanket, slouched towards a tv that was on but silenced. I thought it was all beautiful, but I was sure that the sub-par appearance was something that didn’t exactly put Garrett at ease. He was embarrassed by the mediocrity that surrounded him, but he’d be damned before he admitted it. He was good at making the most of things. He gestured to the walls as we passed through, sparsely decorated. “Home sweet home!” he chirped.

It _was_ a home. It wasn’t much, but he had made it that. I was jealous.

He rushed me through the kitchen. “I tried to clean up a little, but it still doesn’t look great in here, so just ignore it,” he said hastily, pulling open the back door to their little pavement square of a back yard, a shared space between all three apartments but never used by the other two tenants. A small glass patio table stood between two wooden lawn chairs with broken backs but all four legs fully functioning; the entire set faced out towards downtown, the sun dipping low into the horizon. I walked to the chair on the left. “You want a beer?” Garrett asked, still halfway inside.

“No, thanks,” I said.

He brought me one anyway, uncapping the green glass bottle and handing it to me as he sat. I sipped at it disinterestedly. “So,” he said, turning to sit sideways in the chair to face me. “What’s eating you?” I shrugged once, bottle dangling from my fingertips. I scratched at a small scab on my arm. “Uh-uh, no, you don’t get to scare the shit out of me, callin’ me like you’re about to pass out, then drive two hours, and then sit here and _shrug_ at me.” He threw his bottle cap at me. “That’s not how it’s supposed to go.”

I studied the cracks in the pavement, trying to figure the best way to put my discomfort into words. If there was anyone in the world I could trust to process it all right and then spit me out on the right track, I knew it was my brother. I was good at doing what my head told me to do, but the heart was a different matter. My brother followed his heart down dark alleyways, across plains of broken glass and then out into the sunlight of bliss. My head refused the adventures, afraid of the dark at any cost. I couldn’t lace together any words that made sense. Seeing this, he bumped his bottle against my knees. “Just talk and we’ll sort it out,” he said with a softer air.

So I did. And the words came out in ugly, tangled strings and fragments. I knocked back the beer and another in no time, and Garrett sat and listened patiently without breaking in about how much he loved the band or how big of an idiot I was for not being sure straight away. Disjointed and broken words danced in the air and died, burning embers at our feet. Sunset gave over into night. The light from the kitchen served as the new sun, a dull golden glow sweeping the ground of our conference. Garrett lit a cigarette and offered me one, but I was too busy talking to notice; he left it on the table. I talked shit about Ferrando, about Evan even though he couldn’t control family crises, and I talked shit about Jason Lilley before realizing he didn’t really deserve it and I retracted most of it. When I felt secure enough to stop grasping at straws and little wisps of things that didn’t matter, I slowly stopped talking. I felt spite, anger, the discomforts of my day boil up and out, and then an idyllic equilibrium. Garrett drew his legs up under him, leaning his chin against a closed fist, taking a drag. “Hm,” he said, and that was all.

I picked up the cigarette he had left for me and lit it behind a cupped hand. Exhaling, I bit my lips. “I don’t know what to do,” I confessed.

He tilted his head at me with sympathy. “It sounds like you’re the only one who doesn’t.”

I dragged my hands over my face, dizzy after the outpour. “He said I had to go, but I don’t think I can do it. And I’m afraid that if I _don’t_ go, then I’ll—“

“Look, Walt—“ Garrett took a quick drag. He held his hands out in the space in front of him, finger-painting a plan of action in the air. “Fuck what he said, alright? No one can make you do anything, really.” I started to protest when he shut me up again. “I know he’s your boss; I know that. If for some reason you absolutely couldn’t do it, he couldn’t fire you for not being able to carry it out.” Instantly, without really thinking, I started conjuring up all the stories I could that would keep me from going. I needed a three-week distraction. “But,” Garrett said, reeling my attention back in. “You _can_ do it, and he’s right—you have to.”

I hoped the nausea played across my face as well as it was galloping through me. Little scars of disbelief and anxiety and rough, coarse cinnamon zigzagged my throat and I couldn’t reply.

He detected it because nothing ever escapes him. “Look, I know you don’t think you can. But you’re so much more capable than you’ll let yourself believe, and until you figure that out, you’re never going to move. And you’re denying it, so you’re never going to move until something gives you a little push. This is the universe giving you a biiig fucking push, okay?” He froze his hands in the air, dropped his eye to my level. I was staring at the ground. “Okay, Walt?”

I cleared my throat and ground out an “Okay.”

“And I know you don’t ever go out looking for big breaks—I know that. But that’s how this world works for good people. That’s just the way it works. Haven’t you ever seen a movie?” His face split into an undemanding grin. It was infectious, but I felt like any sudden movement or change in pace might set the world spinning completely off its axis. “Hey, look at me.” I did. He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table. “No one can make you but yourself. No one is more capable of doing this job than you are.” He looked me in the eye. “You have to because you owe it to yourself.”

My fingers fumbled against each other as I put my cigarette out. “Besides,” he added nonchalantly, resting his chin on his laced fingers. “If you don’t, I’ll hate you forever.” I couldn’t help it anymore. A laugh broke from me, embarrassingly loud and well won. With a smile, Garrett punched me in the knee and herded the glass bottles to one corner of the table.

A shadow crossed the light, and the back door creaked open accompanied by the crackling symphony of full plastic grocery bags settling on the floor. “Who’s this out here?” A sweet voice asked, and Garrett jumped to his feet like a kid being picked up from preschool. “Hello, Walt.”

I raised a hand at the figure. “Hey, Danielle. How’re you doing?”

My question was drowned out in her homecoming welcome. Garrett held the door open for her, encircling her in a loving hug and planting a kiss on the top of her head, through her mass of dark springy curls kept back from her face with a maroon headband. She gave a light laugh, pushing him away by the chest after kissing his cheek. She tottered down the two small steps while Garrett cooed concerned ‘ _careful, careful…_ ’s, one hand using Garrett’s for balance and the other resting on her very pregnant belly. I came to her to save her the trouble of walking further. She wrapped her arms around my neck and I looped mine around her back. I admired the skin of her shoulder—smooth, well kept, the loveliest dark brown with almost a mahogany tint. She rubbed comforting circles on my back. “How have you been, love? It’s been so _long!_ ”

We separated, and I looked to Garrett, who was beaming. I hoped beyond all hope that eventually, I could end up with someone who loved me as much as Danielle and Garrett loved each other. She was seven months along, and their relationship served as a constant reminder that there was nothing wrong with doing things backwards according to standard social norms. I imagined that it was easier to get away from such strict expectations, although he would never escape the disapproval of our parents—he was a multidimensional target, a dartboard of shame to them. Half of an interracial, unmarried, expecting couple. He was thrilled, though—thrilled to be in love, unrushed. Thrilled to be a dad. I was thrilled for him.

Garrett looked up from poking the squishy top of Danielle’s middle and spoke before I had the chance to fuck up the moment. “Young Walter here has just decided to undertake a great opportunity for work.” He gave me a look that I couldn’t exactly place. “Didn’t ya?”

Without really thinking about it, I nodded. I drove back to New York, parked my car, and fell asleep in my clothes on my couch without really thinking about it.

 

Until Monday afternoon, I didn’t really think about it. I took a cab to work and left my car at home. Locking the door to an empty apartment makes you feel lonelier than anything else in this world. I kept kicking my duffel bag under my desk, mostly out of agitation. I did no work, and there was no work to do.  I dealt with sideways looks and returned jealous glares, and at the end of the day I was ready to go no matter where it meant. After a quiet and uncomfortable ride in Jason’s gross jeep, he killed the ignition outside the authorized entrance of the venue and gave me a look. “I would pay for this job. I don’t know why you’re not more excited.”

I hoisted up my bag and shoved it over the center console at him. “You fucking go, then. Take me back to the office. Then everyone gets what they want.”

Lilley rolled his eyes and unlocked the jeep door. “Get out of my car, brah.”

“Fine.” I rolled the bag over my lap and tumbled out the door, giving special care to slam it on my way out with a smirk. “I don’t want to be in your shitty ass jeep any longer than I have to. _Brah.”_

As I slung the bag over my shoulder and gave a lazy salute, he tapped the horn once. “Hey, Walt?” I turned, and I shouldn’t have. “Try to tone it down on being a little bitch while you’re out on the road.”

I had to settle for a smile rather than a comeback as he drove away. It was a good sendoff, I think—I was still apprehensive about the coming weeks, but it had been replaced with a steady exhaustion, almost impatience. I had no expectations, other than an abject distance from the band and a few heavy layers of invisibility. Wandering through backstage and waves of aimless, sweaty people, I felt pretty goddamn invisible. I mumbled out as many apologies as I could muster for knocking people with my bag. It was a few uncomfortable minutes before I felt anything but shame for being alive and being there in that moment, and what replaced it was a different shade of embarrassment.

“You need some help, little white boy?”

I swear to Christ. Little white boy?

“Uh,” I said, as I seem to only be able to say these days. I dropped the bag to the floor and held out my hand to the owner of the voice, a stern looking guy with a lopsided smile smacked out of place by amusement. “It’s, uh, Walt. Hi.”

He knocked my hand away. “You our writer?”

A group of passing girls with skirts hiked higher than gravitationally possible skittered by and accidentally kicked my bag. I winced for the safety of my laptop. “Yeah, I guess so.”

The guy tipped his head to one side. “Well, _uh Walt_ , I guess you should _know_ what you are before I let you on the bus with us for a few weeks.”

I herded my bag over towards my ankles. “I’m your writer. Whoever you are.”

To this, he extended his hand. I took it. It didn’t feel like a business deal. “Manager. Poke Esperas.”

“Poke…” I took a mental note. He grinned about it, ratcheting wider by each passing second. “What origin does that name have?”

He threw a gesture behind him at a tall blond guy who had come in to snoop around in the cabinets. “This asshole.”

The blond stood up straight at the mention, face twisted in a benevolent grimace with a bottle of gin in his right hand. He raised it in an almost toast. “Thanks for that.” He nodded at me. “Brad.”

“Brad,” I said, returning the nod. “Okay, hi. Walt.” He shook my hand.

Poke rubbed at his eyebrow, his smile never fading but transforming to fit the situation. “He says he’s our writer, but I think he’s a parrot.” He cleared his throat. “ _Poooke, braaawk…_ repeats every goddamn thing.” He flapped his hands at his sides. “ _Squawk, squawk, Braaaad, squaaaawk.”_

Brad had gone back to rummaging through the cabinets. “Not that you would know, but repetition is a form of memorization.” He produced a stack of three red plastic cups, inspecting them from a few angles. “You still call me Ray from time to time. As our den mother, you ought to learn our names the way Walt here is trying to, and he could do it without your unbidden criticism.” Poke had him pinned with a stare that Brad refused to respond to. “Sir.” With a glance up at me, he waved the bottle over his shoulder. “Come on, I’ll show you off to everyone else.” I followed Brad down a tiny corridor and ignored Poke’s arm-flapping and incessant squawking as per Brad’s suggestion. He edged with disinterest around women decked in threadbare clothing and heels that could break your ankles just by looking at them. He swirled the gin as he scanned the walls. “Where’re you from?”

I scratched at my hair. Hate this question. You’re raised without proper armor to battle stereotypes. “I live in New York now, but I was born in, uh, Virginia.”

“Ah,” Brad said, feeling the wall as he walked. I kept falling a half step behind his long strides. “Not quite tops on the hick ladder. You’re lucky we’ve got one to beat you.” A section of the wall gave slightly to his hand, and he shoved open a hidden door with his shoulder. “That’s shady,” he commented to no one, and then walked through. I followed.

It looked like someone’s dingy living room; well-worn beige couches and a chaise chair in the corner, an unsteady table with a cloudy ashtray and heels propped up. A compact-sized youngish looking guy was unfolding and refolding a ball aluminum foil on one far end of the couch, and at the other end, slender blond guy with reading glasses was folded around a book, knees bent up to his chest. In the chaise chair, the shape of the mass was indeterminable—I could make out sharp elbows, a tattoo above one, and a shock of dark hair. “Papa’s home,” Brad called, brandishing the bottle in front of him by the neck.

The reader lifted his head, but not his eyes. “What’d you get from the hunt?”

Brad checked the front of the bottle. “Seagram. It’s gin. Want some?”

“God, no.” The reader scrunched up his face. “Thanks, though.”

“No problem.” Brad cast a glance over his shoulder at me and gestured with the bottle. “That’s Nate.” He swept his gesture to the right. “And… Trombley, what the fuck are you doing?”

Who I assumed was Trombley looked up, hands clenching at being caught off guard. He looked down at the mess of foil in his hands. After a few too-long beats, he mumbled, “I don’t know.”

Brad pinched the bridge of his nose near his eyes in agitation. “Whatever it is, it looks great.” He tossed the stack of cups at the body on the chaise. “Ray, get up—we have company.” The command found no response. Brad set the bottle on the table and sat on Ray’s legs, which incited a struggle.

“What’s happening in your book?” Trombley asked Nate, standing his pathetic foil statue on wobbly legs on the table.

Nate held his place in the book with a gum wrapper. “Billy Pilgrim just became unstuck in time.”

Something I felt familiar with. I had read Slaughterhouse-Five at least a dozen times growing up. “Doesn’t that happen, like, a thousand times?”

Nate smiled at me. “It’s pretty much all that happens.” He crossed the room and shook my hand. I asked him where the rest of the band was, and he gave me a sideways look. “This is it,” he said.

“How do you have a band name like The Six and only have four?”

Nate shrugged and said to ask Ray, returning to his spot on the couch and his place in the book. I was glad he wasn’t offended by my ignorance—most people back at the magazine were starry-eyed and lulu over this band. I knew less than was probably expected of me. I had spent the weekend staring at the wall in bed rather than reading articles or making calls or watching interviews. I justified it by telling myself that I figured it would make for a real Walden experience.

Ray had been wrestled into something like alertness, sitting with his legs crossed under him and dumping gracious amounts of gin into a cup. I watched him from a distance as he cracked open a Red Bull and upended it into the mix with the gin. Brad made a comment on how disgusting that was going to be, and Ray gave him a lazy punch to the gut. “Go say hi to our writer,” Brad said, but it wasn’t to be. Ray scowled at him, scowled at me, and shoved me out of the way as he passed on his way out. It was a hell of a greeting. “Sorry,” Brad apologized in lieu. “His name and looks are deceiving—he’s not the bright little ray of sunshine you’d expect.”

Trombley looked up from his twiddling thumbs. “I think he’s okay,” he said, voice low. He clawed at a hangnail, ripping tiny shreds of skin before Nate noticed and made him stop.

“Just give Ray a chance before you write anything about him,” Nate said, and I said that of course I’d only show the best that I saw.

“That’s wise of you, Walt.” Brad drank from the bottle and looked at his watch. “We ought to get a move-on for sound check, gents.”

I followed them, as I would learn to. Ray was rushing through sound check, swearing crossly at the slowness and laborious precision of the rest of the band. Brad, when he could take no more sass, eventually said something to him too low for me to hear. Whatever it was, it did the job of shutting Ray up and snapping him back into reality with cheeks flushed deep and a tangible embarrassment replacing the smug irritation from earlier. He wriggled up onto an amp and wrapped the microphone cord around his wrist. “Hey.”

I was watching Trombley try to tune his snare with a drum key. Ray only got my attention when I noticed the crumpled set list bounce near my feet. I picked it up and turned at the waist. “What?”

He slacked the cord and retightened it and slacked it again; the pressure left a faint ligature mark. “Sorry for being a dick earlier.” He was watching his hands.

I cast a sweeping look across the stage. Nate, who apparently notices everything, was watching out of the corner of his eye. He grabbed at Brad’s elbow and gestured over. Ray swung the microphone so that it wrapped around his arm a few times before running out of cord. I tossed the set list back at him underhand. “It’s alright. Sorry for interrupting your nap.”

His mouth wrenched up into a small grin as he smoothed out the paper. “Just never do it again and we’ll get along just fine.”

Brad came to the amp to turn some dials. “You playing nice?”

“I’m trying,” Ray said, knocking Brad in the back of the head with the mic before getting to his feet and taking a valiant jump off the amp.

 

A handful of hours and one encore later, they’d played a great show. If anything went wrong technically, I was too naïve to notice. It wasn’t the experience I had expected. Whenever Evan tours with bands or even sees a single show, he writes about it being a transcendent experience, about how for a few hours, you’re completely changed and you know yourself better than you’ve ever known anything before. I wasn’t swept away in the river of self-realization. I didn’t lose myself at all. At the end of the whole business, I was still being dragged from point A to point B by overexcited musicians, still futilely trying to shake the unshakable dread of not fitting in.

The band did the whole hand-shaking and cheek-kissing and picture-taking cavalcade following the show and I wandered onto the bus, generally unaffected. All I really felt was this immense fatigue, like I’d been eroding from the sudden shifts in the weather—pale, cool, relatively intransient shadows in my little corner pocket of the world changing over to the eclipsing sunshine of whatever this was.

The bunks were mostly full of undone blankets and sheets, empty plastic bottles, scraps of paper, articles of clothing. I’d been handed some run-of-the-mill bullshit at work about respecting the tour vehicle, how it was my new home for the next x number of days. It didn’t feel like home. I didn’t even have a place to sleep. My hand itched for my phone in my pocket, but it was nearing midnight—too late to call Garrett, even though he had texted me over and over asking me to call him when my first day was over.

I slid onto the weird black vinyl couch-like things near the back of the bus, tapping my knees erratically with my fingers. I had been wishing that maybe Brad would walk in and push me by the shoulder into another social situation (no matter how adamantly I swore to myself that I didn’t want it to happen) when the door to the bus was kicked open, a roar of crowd noise sweeping in like a draught. I turned in time to see Ray, with his back to the inside of the bus, waving and smiling and making several lewd gestures up until the very microsecond that he slammed the door shut, spun around, and deflated, sinking to the floor. He made an audible sigh almost like a comic “whew” and rubbed at his eyes.

I didn’t feel like I belonged enough yet to say anything, so I fiddled with some spare threads on a patch of the knee of my jeans. He sat there for a few moments in relative silence, gave in to a fit of groans, and dragged himself to his feet, only getting a few steps before noticing me. The groan he was in the middle of stuck short in his throat. “Oh.”

I raised a hand in a wave at him.

“You gotta leave,” he said with a simple finality and a shrug. “Everyone knows this is my alone time.”

“I haven’t got anywhere to go,” I said, feeling the universe nudging me from behind. This was one of those ‘stand up for yourself, Walt’ moments, but I ducked out of the way before it hit me. “I won’t bother you.”

“Mmmm, mm-mm, nope.” He yanked me up by the elbow, brushed off my jacket, then pushed me forward towards the door of the bus. “You’re bothering me already. Just come back in like half an hour.”

“But I—“

“You’ll be fine,” he said flatly before yanking open the door. “Have fun!” He pushed me out and I missed all the steps, lucky to fall on the hands of fans that weren’t waiting for me. 


End file.
